Swiss glaciers have lost 10% of their volume over the past two years, shrinking as much as they did in the 1960-1990s, due to extreme weather and climate deregulation, according to a report published today.

The Swiss glaciers lost the 6% of their volume in 2022setting records, and shrunk by 4% in 2023according to the team of cryosphere scientists at the Swiss Academy of Natural Sciences.

Limited snowfall during the winter and very high temperatures caused this 10% decline in the volume of these masterpieces of nature in the last two years and the scientists’ verdict is irrevocable: “Swiss glaciers are melting at an ever-increasing speed”.

“It is the combination of the very adverse succession of extreme weather events and climate change” that makes extreme results more likely, explains Matthias Huss, head of Switzerland’s glacier monitoring network Glamos.

“If we continue at the pace of the last few years – everything is moving at a faster pace – every year will be a bad year,” he warns.

“And we have seen in recent years such dramatic changes in the climate that we can imagine this country without glaciers”, admits the scientist who emphasizes however that a decisive action to stabilize the climate by zeroing out CO2 emissions as soon as possible would allow the preservation of “a third of the ice in Switzerland”.

This means “that all the small glaciers will disappear and that the big glaciers will be much smaller, but there will still be some ice in the higher areas of the Alps and some glaciers that we will be able to show to our grandchildren”, Matias wants to hope. Hush.

“Water Tower”

The melting of the ice has affected the whole of Switzerland, which is considered the Water Tower of Europe thanks to its 1,400 glaciers that feed countless lakes, rivers and streams.

In southern and eastern Switzerland, glaciers melted almost as much this year as in the record year 2022. Thus, south of Valais and in the Angadines, ice melting was measured at a depth of 3,200 meters, at a time when equilibrium conditions prevailed at this altitude here and few years.

This summer’s high temperatures in Switzerland have pushed the 0°C boundary – or isotherm – to a record altitude of 5,298m, from Dufour point (4,636m).

Already during the winter 2022-2023 the level of snowfall was very low on both sides of the Alps and the temperatures were unusually high. There was unusually little snow in all the ski resorts.

The layer of snow

Above 1,000 meters, in the first fortnight of February, snow levels were slightly higher than the winters of the lowest snowfall recorded in 1964, 1990 and 2007. But melting reached new records in the second fortnight of February and the amount of snow only reached 30% of the average of the last several years.

At an altitude of more than 2,000 meters also, more than half of the automatic measuring stations, which have the values ​​of the last 25 years, showed new low records.

June was dry and warm and resulted in snowpack melting 2 to 4 weeks earlier than usual.

These conditions prevented the regeneration of the glaciers.

According to last year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, Giec) report, the melting of ice and snow is one of the 10 most serious threats caused by global warming.

According to another report published in January by the journal Science, half of the Earth’s ice is doomed to disappear by the end of the century if the rise in temperatures is limited to +1.5°C compared to the pre-industrial era – which it is also the most ambitious goal of the Paris Climate Agreement!